PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsWaltzing Matilda
guitar song · Strings
Waltzing Matilda Guitar Tab
- Composer
- Marie Cowan
- Year
- 1903
- Key
- C
- Time
- 4/4
- Tempo
- 104 BPM
- Difficulty
- Easy · ★★
- First note
- C4
Waltzing Matilda on guitar
The full melody, rendered as six-string guitar tab in standard tuning you can read on screen or print for the stand — free, and never truncated.
Marie Cowan after Christina Macpherson, 1903; words A. B. Paterson — public domain.
How to practise this on guitar
Waltzing Matilda is in C and the tab opens on C4 — find that fret, settle your hand there, and notice how little it has to move: the arrangement is worked out with a fret-hand position economy, so consecutive notes stay under your fingers instead of leaping up and down the neck. Read the numbers, not the note names: string line plus fret is the whole instruction, and an open string costs you nothing.
Play it well under around 104 BPM with a metronome and let each note ring into the next — the tails under the numbers show you how long. When your take review marks a bar, loop just that bar until the fret-hand shift inside it feels automatic, then rejoin the line. Speed is the last thing you add, never the first. By the numbers, this setting runs 91 notes across 17 bars, from G3 up to C5 in 4/4 time.
Also playable on
The same melody is graded across 6 Playsoloist instruments. See every version, with difficulty and provenance, on the Waltzing Matilda cross-instrument hub.
Keep exploring
Free on the App Store
Play Waltzing Matilda — and hear every note graded.
Soloist Guitar reads this six-string guitar tab in standard tuning under the notation and grades your take on-device, note by note — free on iPhone, no ads, no account.
Get Guitar on the App Store